**The Apple Developer Transition Kit: A Controversial Move**

Apple has recently announced its plans to transition to ARM-based chips, which has sparked controversy among developers and users alike. The company is offering a developer transition kit, but with some surprising caveats.

For those interested in getting their hands on an ARM-based Mac, they'll need to sign an NDA and agree not to share any benchmarks or performance data online. This means that if someone were to break the NDA, they'd be violating Apple's terms of service. While it may seem like a minor issue, this raises questions about the company's commitment to transparency and developer trust.

The main concern, however, is that developers won't be able to keep the transition kit for long. They'll need to return it to Apple at some point, which means they won't get to keep their new ARM-based Mac. To make up for this, though, developers will receive a $500 refund. It's unclear whether this is meant as a gesture of goodwill or simply as a way to offset the cost of returning the device.

The reasoning behind this move is still unclear, but it's likely that Apple wants to incentivize developers to support its ecosystem. By offering a developer transition kit and then taking away the hardware after a certain period, the company may be hoping to create a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) among developers. After all, who wouldn't want to get their hands on a brand-new ARM-based Mac? The $500 refund is just a small consolation, though.

**A Developer's Perspective**

As a developer myself, I have to say that this move seems counterintuitive. Why would Apple ask us to give them our money and then take away the hardware we're using it with? Don't get me wrong – I'm sure there are some good reasons behind this decision, but from where I'm sitting, it looks like a case of "we want your money, even if you can't keep the hardware."

I also have to wonder why Apple couldn't simply release a developer kit that runs on an iPad. Would they really need to give us a separate device just to make up for their transition costs? It seems like there's some sort of corporate overhead at play here.

**A Long-View Perspective**

Looking back at the history of the Mac, it's clear that Apple has always been focused on innovation and pushing the boundaries of what's possible. Six years ago, Apple announced the Intel Max chip, which was seen as a bold move at the time. Whether or not that decision paid off is still up for debate, but it's clear that Apple is committed to staying ahead of the curve.

The fact that they're now moving to ARM-based chips suggests that they're confident in their ability to create high-performance hardware without the need for expensive x86 processors. This could have significant implications for the future of Mac development, particularly when it comes to graphics-intensive applications.

**A Podcast and YouTube Connection**

Speaking of podcasts and YouTube channels, I want to give a shoutout to my own channel, Not Another Diet, which is all about health, fitness, and tech. If you're interested in learning more about these topics, I'd encourage you to check it out. As for the podcast, we're actually thinking of starting this as a regular show, possibly even doubling up on the content.

We'd love to hear from our audience, though – are there any specific topics or themes that you'd like us to cover? Let us know in the comments! We're always looking for new ideas and perspectives.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enApple has announced that it's moving away from Intel CPUs in its max over to its own ARM based CPUs which it calls Apple silicon of course if you're in the market for a new Mac should you wait for these new ARM based machines or is it still safe to buy an Intel based Mac now let's discuss so I'm joined again today by my good friend Pete who is also my business partner welcome Pete pleased to be here Dave excellent now what I want to do is answer this question really quickly okay because I I appreciate everybody's time and someone looks up a YouTube video they don't want to listen to us waffle necessarily we will do some waffling but let's answer the question first and I think in order to do this what we need to do is to break down the computers that Apple makes into categories and this is always very difficult because that's almost an impossible task but what we've done is we've decided there are three categories we're going to go with casual enthusiast and pro yep okay so let's start with the casual user okay now this is somebody who uses a computer for content consumption so they're watching YouTube's they're browsing the web checking their Facebook's bit of email some Microsoft Word or Excel or equivalent you know office tasks this kind of user is going to be fairly cost conscious or not not buying the most expensive equipment they don't need the most expensive equipment they don't need to high performance those kind of things so let's just go through Apple's lineup of computers that a casual user my purchase okay so I think that includes the MacBook Air the MacBook Pro 13 inch the two-port model the 21 inch iMac and the lower spec Mac minis okay couple of questions and on a categorization lineup their MacBook Air you can get that in a quad core i7 variant can you know you can so are you putting that in amongst this casual user base I am still doing that because I think that's a vanity upgrade it's yeah it's a quad core i7 in name but it's not the same as having a core Core i7 in the member Pro 13-inch for starters the MacBook Air just doesn't have the thermal design to cope with a high specification processor so as far as I'm aware it runs at a lower wattage it's lower performance I think it's a little bit misleading I mean it is better than the base model but it's not on macbook pro levels of performance and it throttles very quickly when it gets hot which it does very quickly because the fan is not connected in any way to the CPU inside the mouth okay probably sounds like a Harrier Jump Jet as well when it's when it's doing that and you mentioned the MacBook Pro 13 so just to be clear you're just talking about the two port one here yeah and they're the two port on the four port are very different models if you take them apart they're different internally the four port model has two fans has better speakers and it is a different different machine and the entry-level two port model still has the eighth generation CPUs in there's nothing wrong with an eighth generation CPU but obviously the temperature narration has got much better performance better onboard graphics you know yet and the fact that Apple hasn't updated those entry-level models would indicate that they maybe have plans for a new model in the future interesting very good okay and would you include education purchases in this user base yeah I think we do not that education users are casual users but when we insult anybody but obviously education or purchases are always on a budget so they need to get the maximum amount for for the money they've got available so they are likely to be buying these sort of great machines so I think that's a reasonable lineup how can we answer the question for this user base right so I think if you're in this user base looking at these particular machines if you're gonna wait for arm you've not got a long wait you know Apple we're going to tackle these machines first because their CPUs are already good enough to replace all of these machines you know if you if you benchmark this iPad pro which has to a 12 in it which isn't even the latest and fastest what you'll find is that it outperforms all of these machines and all right I actually interestingly I benchmarked my iPhone 11 which has a 13 in and the single core score is considerably higher than than this as well so Apple has got more CPUs in its lineup that will perform at much higher speeds and could easily replace all of these things so I think those are the things that they will tackle first possibly not the iMac just yet but I would expect to see a macbook pro 13 inch with two ports or possibly more but an entry-level macbook pro 13 inch with an arm CPU before the end of the year I could be completely wrong but that's just my expectation possibly a MacBook Air or a MacBook if you remember the old 12-inch MacBook that would be a good candidate for an arm CPU and the Mac Mini because of course Apple already use that for the developer transition kit yes it'll be later so if you are happy to wait a few months is what we're talking about we mean we're filming this in July we're probably talking about September October time so if you're happy to wait until then you can be pretty sure that there will be some arm computers available that will fit your needs and will handle these workloads and will be better than the Intel machines in all likelihood so we're saying if you if you can wait yeah but you don't have to right I think you know Apple we're going to support the Intel machines if there's at least six years of support for those and again we'll discuss our thinking on that in a moment but there's at least six years support so you'd probably be perfectly safe by an Intel machine and whether you buy Intel or arm it's going to cope with that workload you know content consumption browsing the way of email and office those kind of tasks no problem at all even a bit of like gaming actually with apple arcade type titles fair enough so the next sort of user base that we've identified or category is what we're calling the enthusiasts yeah so I think an enthusiast is someone who's more interested in computing more interested in the specifications of their device so they may have a higher specification whether they need that or not is kind of irrelevant they want to have a have a better machine photo-editing maybe bit of video editing perhaps some music production those kind of things I can see category of user there yeah I'd agree with that and have you got in mind the machines that you sort plop into that category yeah so I think we're talking about the MacBook Pro 13 inch the four port model yep probably the base model of the 16 inch member pro as well really okay I know it's a bit more expensive but well I know that they were enthusiastic I means okay I'd say the iMac 27-inch and the top spec Mac Mini the six core i7 yeah I think that falls into it into yes I know some pros actually buy those as well but I think I put it in your enthusiastic camp fair enough and how would you answer the question for this group of users well it's very similar really you've still got the support lifecycle but a little bit different for the enthusiast now I'd expect that an enthusiast user would be on a shorter upgrade cycle so maybe three years you know maybe even two years or you know a shorter cycle or a casual user might keep their machine for a bit longer oh if even if they're not keeping it for longer they probably don't worry so much about the sale price at the end because it's a lower-cost machine at the outset so someone who's expecting to move a laptop on in three years they'll probably be happier you know they'll have an eye on what the price will be for selling that on ebay at the end and putting it towards their next laptop sure so if Apple are still supporting Intel for six years then getting rid of the Machine at three years would be ideal and they'll still be a used market for it in those casual users that want to buy a used machine with higher specification yeah okay that makes sense to me so I would have no issue buying any of these machines Intel if it's what you need now because if you wait for the arm equivalents of these I think you'll be waiting a little bit longer but I think we will see these necessarily this year possibly next year interesting we'll talk about that a bit more in detail in a sec last face absolutely and the iMac is is one just to consider because I don't think it's any secret that the iMac is gonna get a redesign yeah now when we watch WWDC us there are a lot of those pro displays kicking about and I actually wondered whether we they were going to transpire to be the new iMac I think you might be onto something with that and I think we might see a new I Mac sooner than you anticipate okay but we'll have to wait and see master agency there is certainly talk of a 24 inch iMac so that the smaller one will get get a bigger screen and we'll see what happens to the bigger one but those of those are really great computers those 5k displays it's a great value proposition if you don't already have your own monitor what you get for your money is it's really good it's a really good machine yeah so I think yeah so for the enthusiast if you need something so you know by Intel be confident in that if you happy to wait you know you're going to have a bit of a weight on your hands but then there'll be an arm alternative okay so that then brings us to the pro group of users that we've identified them and what sort of machines would you pitch in that category when we consider a pro user we're talking about a very wide variety of possibilities you know you could be a a wedding photographer that's a pro user up to a research scientist or a developer you know a video editor and that could be someone who's editing videos you know on a small scale it could be you know an actual Hollywood movie studio so that there's just massive variety and let's not forget audio professionals who need something like the new Mac Pro for example for the PCIe upgrade ability yeah so a huge variety of users what machines are they using I think we can include the MacBook Pro 16 inch some of those users so we're seeing saying some some of those might be in that casual sorry that enthusiast category but because of that that is an awesome machine we're saying that pro users particularly with the high specs might use that yeah I think so if you're a professional photographer for example you do location shooting you probably are going to want a notebook the MacBook Pro 16 inch has got plenty of them fin it and great when you take it back to the studio as well so I can definitely pro users will be interested in that okay ting that machine the iMac 27-inch I'm including that again but we're talking about the top model or with the i-9 in it oh nine yeah okay Vega 56 and you know when you spec it up like that it offers in a lot of cases more performance than the iMac pro for two-thirds of the cost yes crazy really brilliant of course we're including the iMac Pro but when it comes to the base model of I'm a pro I don't think I'd buy that if I don't think I would buy the iMac pray but that's just unless you really want that gunmetal finish which some people will in fact enthusiasts will buy the on that Pro because they want that I think that's do Civet II and you got the money and I always say this if you've got the money and it's what you want go for it you know it's not our place to judge what people should and shouldn't do with their money so we're just trying to define you know reason of all categories everyone can figure out where they where they fit in these things but with the iMac Pro if you're looking at getting that for performance you know the base model is outperformed by the iMac 27-inch in a lot of cases so you can spend less money and get the same performance if you need the Xeon processors you need the ECC Ram you need to you know the 12 core or if they do it 12 Corvette you need them more cause you need that performance then why would you buy an iMac Pro I think now that the Mac Pro is available you'd buy the Mac Pro yeah and by your own display to go with it so I think the iMac Pro it's probably a bit of a bit of a white elephant in line up at the moment I think so okay I think I'd be cautious about purchasing that when it comes to the Mac Pro obviously people look at this and they I mean I've said the same thing this is a really expensive computer you're paying a lot of a massive premium for the specification that you're getting yeah and a lot of people would say you can get an equivalent these spec to Windows machine for a lot less yeah and that's perfectly true you can but some people need Mac they need Mac OS they need the software that runs on Mac and they're tied to it and changing is not an option so they need to go with the Mac Pro and actually we'll talk about this in a little bit but it's not as expensive as it appears okay so if you're a professional you're buying for business yep because we say a professional gets paid for their work therefore it's a business purchase you know a lot of cases businesses will be you know will have tax incentives for the things that they purchase they can offset it against the tax they pay which actually brings down the cost of everything again as and a business we'll look at something and say you know how long do I need this this tool for how long do you know what kind of lifecycle do I want out of this computer how much is it going to cost me over that period of time am I happy with that cost so when it comes to answering this question it's a case of if you need it you've got to buy it yes you can't as a business you can't wait around and I think you will be waiting around a long time for Apple to release its own silicon versions of these computers okay and I'm not even convinced that the Mac Pro will get upgraded within the next two years I mean Apple spoke about a two-year transition period but I think that's unlikely is Apple gonna be able to make its own processors that perform on the level of say a 28 core Xeon and to have the graphics performance of the four Vega two graphics cards that you can spec on me which is just crazy crazy so I I think that one will be a little while coming so if you if you're waiting for arm you'll be waiting for a long time so I think for a business you've got to buy Intel so those are the quick answers to the questions so I want you to get the answer done done quickly and then we can talk about why we've come to these conclusions so we're going to talk about what's happened you know in history we're going to talk about graphics cards just great graphics cards what's the future for those EGP you going to do some interesting calculations for total cost of ownership to show you how the Mac Pro is not as expensive as you think it is can we also talk about the software developer kit that Apple is providing for um developers to develop for arm yes yes we can excellent let's let's do that so first of all I think it would be useful to just reflect back on a little bit of history now this is not the first CPU architecture transition that Apple has done so if we look back in history and recall the transition from PowerPC over to Intel CPUs we maybe learn some lessons and look at the time scales of what happened then and apply those time scales to this transition we maybe come up with some ideas on how long Apple is going to be supporting each yep I think that's a good idea so if we go right back so PowerPC to Intel and I do remember this because I was a Mac user at that time you know I had various different PowerPC Macs and also through that transition period I had both PowerPC and Intel Macs you know using Rosetta and so I've got a fairly good grasp of what it was like back then I think it'll be similar again this time how would you sum up the process in a couple of words literally actually it was pretty seamless but there were things that didn't work you know there were things that he had to solve for instance your PowerPC Macs you know software was available for both PowerPC and Intel yet to pick the right thing and what happened his developers started to prioritize the Intel development over you know what you've done what you would expect to happen happened and you know we had the Intel max and for a while they were running applications through Rosetta which was a little bit slow but it was okay you know it was a period that we got through and I think Apple did get some hatred as a result of it but at the same time it was the right thing to do because a PowerPC CPUs were just not keeping up with Intel and Apple was making this great pretense of saying how great things were I remember all the efforts for the g5 power Mac you know and everybody knew that the Intel machines massively outperformed this thing and apples trying to sell this as a state-of-the-art computer and it just clearly wasn't so I think it was the right thing to do I think this moved to arm is the right thing to do one of the things that makes apples so appealing is that they control the hardware and the software and with control over the CPU that gets even better the optimization gets much better that's not to say that Windows isn't a great system if I think I think it's worth saying that it's amazing what Microsoft has achieved when you consider the millions of possible permutations of Hardware combinations yeah and you know Windows 10 is fantastic it's very stable but they don't have that ability to do that kind of Hardware optimization in the same way that Apple do so I I think he's a good move and I think it's worth going through the pain area four I also think I'll miss the future and I've been saying that you know for a long time so was it 2005 that the announcement was made to move away from PowerPC to Intel chips by Apple yeah WWDC June 2005 and I think the first Hardware didn't ship until the following January 2006 yeah and then we got a 15-inch MacBook Pro okay and then in February there was a Mac Mini remember that was quite cheesed off because I just bought the g4 Mac Mini that's previously and then in May we had the MacBook July was the iMac and then in August we got a Mac Pro using the same cheesegrater chassis that they'd use for the Power Mac g5 yeah I remember so a huge amount of computers released in the space of a year was six months really wasn't it mm-hmm yeah but of course the advantage was that all of the Intel processors were faster than their PowerPC equivalents so most of these were called 2 duos and we had them obviously the Mac Pro was a Xeon based yep so they did the hardware change fairly quickly I don't think it'd be as quick this time unless Apple's been preparing this for years you know maybe maybe we'll all get surprised by it but I suspect the hardware changeover will take take the two years I was talking about and what's your thinking behind that why not the six-month a period that we saw back with PowerPC to Intel well we don't know him it could be we just don't know how good Apple's silicon is doing I mean we know what we've got in the iPad we know how amazing it is so yeah you benchmark this thing and you get a faster single core performance and a fast a multi-core performance than my MacBook Pro 13 inch which has got the i7 855 nine you processor that is not a slouch that is a decent processor and it runs well in that in the MacBook Pro 13 inch I never use that computer thing going this is really slow it's not it's great but this is faster and not only that when it comes to graphics performance so the Intel chip has got the iris plus 6 5 5 this is 50% quicker it's incredible yeah now with no cooling as well we're no cooling and of course what everyone will say is a habit you can't take those benchmarks seriously because they this is a bursting thing you know it can burst up to that speed but then it's gonna get thermally throttled back I'm not convinced about that because I actually use my iPad for editing photos I've even done video editing on it and I've never sat there thinking this is slow I've never sat there thinking this is getting really hot the only time it gets really hot is when you've run games on so I'm not convinced I think it is as good as the benchmarks indicate further to this I actually had to use this as my main computer if you remember earlier this year it's several weeks I was doing all my work on an iPad and it was and you were cheerful which is an indication that it performed well it's a rare thing so yeah it is a very good good system so the CPUs are already brilliant but we don't know how much more brilliant yeah yeah what's what's the latest gestation yeah what's the a14 gonna be like you know nobody really knows so it's not affecting your viewpoint on potentially the rollout of new hardware yes okay because I as good as City as good as it gets there's the graphics issue that we still need to talk about and there's the simple fact that the Mac Pro can be bought with a 28 cause Eon and no matter which way you look at it the arm CPUs that Apple currently have are not there yet will they get there you know by the end of the year probably not I think you know it's going to take a little bit longer to see all of these things get refreshed I'm not even convinced that we'll see an arm Mac Pro within the two-year period okay I'm prepared to be wrong on that but we'll wait and see well let's maybe look back on this in six months time and see if we were right so that I mean that was the hardware let's move over to the software and the support for the Intel system yep so the first Intel only Mac OS was ten point six which was snow leopard Snow Leopard and that was 2009 yep so three three years after the the hardware transition yes and four years after the announcement they'd gone to an Intel only operating system so if we apply that same logic to this transition period then we would expect that in 2024 there will be an arm only version of Mac OS yeah now that doesn't mean that overnight all of the Intel machines are going to stop working you know Apple will still provide updates security updates for their systems beyond when did Apple drop support for PowerPC so support for rosetta which essentially would would be that was dropped from Mac OS in ten point seven which is Lion and that was July 2011 and interestingly the last Apple app to feature support for PowerPC processors was iTunes ten point six point three and that was released in June 2012 so a consumer app was understandably the last thing to be supported so the last PowerPC and Intel release of Mac OS was leopard so that would have been ten point five yep and that was obsolete in June 2011 yeah ceased to receive the security updates and stuff so basically six years that's where we were getting our six years from that we were quite in earlier if Apple does the same thing again then in 2026 they'll have dropped security updates for intel-based Macs yeah basically so if you're someone who then owns an Intel based Mac you're you're then in a position where can you run it for awhile without getting security updates and the answer today is yes you can I mean the computer won't stop working so typically people developing Mac OS apps are going to be using Xcode so at the moment that's one development suite will now output two different applications two binaries basically you'll have one for x86 and one for armed but presumably once Apple stopped support Xcode won't have that facility anymore so how will app developers continue to update their apps well they won't they won't be able to know in all right good I mean there are other ways of developing apps so there may be some niche applications that do still get updated but in the main after six years it is really defined and this is going to affect that resale value on the use market that we spoke about earlier that's not to say that people won't want to buy these machines you know lots of there is a market for retro computers and curiosities but the market will be flooded with these machines yeah so I'm expecting the resale values will be very low people will buy them though it's still to run Windows on them yep because they of course will run Windows and hopefully Apple will provide a facility to make that easy on the intel macs you know but I wouldn't count on it so if you're taking that six years into consideration most people you know with a laptop you know the casual user that we spoke about earlier it might stretch their laptop out you know some people keep their computers for a very long time I've got a MacBook Air from all my wife has gone MacBook Air from 2012 that she still uses that's eight years old and it runs fine so I mean it just this is something that needs to be considered by everybody who's thinking about buying an Intel machine that's I mean we've already answered a question and you don't need to not buy an Intel machine but how much further in time do we need to get before you're going to start something hmm it's probably not a good idea now you know in six months from now would we still be saying it's okay to buy an Intel machine again I think if you're a pro user the arguments you've put forward say probably that's still okay if you're an enthusiast you're probably on the cusp of thinking no if you're one of these casual users so I would say definitely not okay so history shows us then that we we've probably got you know six years that's where we're getting our estimation from but Apple have said they want to do the transition in two years so they've also said they're going to keep supporting Intel max for a long time they also said that they still got new Intel max in the pipeline so it could be different it could actually be longer than six years if Apple is still releasing new into a max yeah and I guess there's also that kudos factor because I suspect Apple make a visual delineation between perhaps ARM based machines and Intel based machines and that in itself may make people want to have the arm-based ones as an almost a kudos thing hmm yeah I can see that happening I think something else that we need to say as well so yeah I think six years is probably a worst-case scenario it could be that Apple wall will support them for longer as something to bear in mind is that when you're an early adopter of new Apple stuff you do do some beta testing for them it's definitely true and that's true across Apple's entire lineup so I think a lot of people probably want to hang on I can't see professional users wanting to jump into arm CPUs I think no they'll hold back and wait and see what's actually gonna happen okay so that's that's the history bit done what's next okay so you mentioned earlier about discrete graphics and will that be a thing with the new arm-based processors okay so in Apple's developer documentation they talk about the new Apple silicon as being a system-on-chip SOC so the graphics is built into you you know it's one chip that does everything so you haven't got that cost of copying stuff over PCI Express and that's where Apple gains efficiency because of the way they do things so you know the the GPU has its own tile memories which you can use for doing various things and then when it gets to final render it will then use the system memory in a more traditional approach with a discrete GPU on PCI Express that you know there's a lot of tuna throwing so Apple can do more with less they don't need to make GPUs as powerful as a discrete GPU to get the same amount of performance as something else to factor in as well as that Apple is already using arm CPUs to accelerate graphics yeah so the t1 chip is a t2 t2 so this is the security chip if you've got a touch bar or fingerprint reader Mac I think it's in the new Mac Pro so the security chip is an ARM based processor and it gets used for encoding and decoding various types of video and that does speed things up and that's a great example of efficiency isn't it rather than having a chip that basically just does one job and sits dormant the rest of the it's actually being utilized by the system at other times which is a good example of how Apple's complete control that the closed loop does bring benefits yeah solutely because the t2 chip is also handling the interaction between the hard disk and a CPU as well so Apple is able to do more with less specification and that's why although on the surface of it you can say oh I can go and get a better PC for less money actually if you put a PC and a Mac side-by-side with the same specifications sometimes you'll find that the Mac is is faster it's not always the case obviously PCs completely win out when it comes to gaming but there are things where where the Apple is just more efficient because Apple has that massive advantage over Microsoft and the PC market so discrete GPUs don't seem to be part of Apple's develop a roadmap as it stands at the moment but it's difficult to see how they can do that because we mentioned earlier you can spec that Mac Pro up with effectivity for are very few queries and graphics cards yet I think are they 16 or 32 gig of ram each you know I mean it's a huge amount of GPU resource now apples so the GPU in here if you do a metal testing Geekbench 5 I think it comes in just under 10,000 and the the newer chips probably bench a little bit ahead of that but you're still a long way short of one of those Vega to use you know which i think is more like 18 90,000 or the 5700 that you can spec you know that's going to be in the 70,000 oh yeah so how does Apple replace that kind of massive GPU performance on the mac pro with a simple system on chip don't have the answer and that may tie into you know you've been talking about whether they just gradually retire the mac pro and bring out something else but even then that question is still there to be answered yeah and I don't think they can abandon PCI Express because if you take an audio professional you know they need hardware they need adding cards to connect up their various bits of equipment they need those PCIe slots yeah so I can't see how Apple can abandon that but and there are other armed machines out there with PCI Express there are and you know so there's no no reason why we couldn't have discrete GPU still it's just that Apple hasn't included that in its current road map what it's announced to the developers they're focusing on the discrete GPUs but then that also makes sense because those are the machines are going to focus on first I was gonna say it fits into what we're predicting here in terms of the the casual user base giving their upgrades personally they won't need discrete graphics anyway so obviously you've been doing a lot of focus in your videos on EGP you where do you think that sits with apples plans and their silicon for a while Apple were really pushing EGP you and it is a great solution when you get it working but I found that there are lots of issues with it Apple has stopped selling the Blackmagic Design II GPUs that Excel the sonnet breakaway puck either which they used to sell have they got anything that they saw no no okay so the other the other issue is um some people are reporting that in the latest Mac OS in Catalina the Polaris GPU so that's things like the rx 580 if you've got an e GPU based on that and there's issues in Catalina it seems right and there's definitely issues in Catalina with the 5,700 XE some weird bug in the drivers just cripples the performance unless you plug in a second monitor yeah and then you get the performance it's really bizarre and the fact that this bug still exists and there's been two Mac OS updates since the reports of that book came out since those drivers were implemented so apples not made it a priority to fix those things so I get the feeling they're abandoning a GPU which i think is a poor thing to do considering how much money people have invested in it I was going to say if you've been made that investment you're gonna feel pretty aggrieved aren't you with that lack of support and those bugs well yeah because you know they used it to sell a lot of Mac minis let's be honest and a lot of laptops where you might have otherwise bought a desktop machine deliberate or just a change of direction I just I think is they went with what they thought was right at a time much like the 2013 Mac Pro you know they thought dual GPU computing was going to be a thing and it never never turned out that way mainly because Apple didn't make it easy and that that's another thing developers need to have easy access to this stuff with the 2013 Mac Pro for example you got two AMD graphics cards in there but to take advantage of it the developers need to code the app in a certain way if you stick Windows on the same machine what you'll find is that the two MD cards are connected via crossfire X yeah and because Windows the way Windows treats that it just means more apps can take advantage of it so you actually get better performance in windows of your GPUs on your Mac Pro 2013 Mac Pro days that's just a typical example of Apple designing themselves into a corner and they're not being prepared to to fix the issue yeah and you know they do I feel in some cases they do treat their customers with contempt in the way that they just abandon people who spent a lot of money on their recommendation yeah Apple was pushing EGP you heavily and I guess the problem with that is if they keep doing that which they do it can make you sometimes skeptical about what to invest in although obviously the move to arm is a it's a fairly cemented and sure bet hmm so what about um Thunderbolt support because that's an Intel technology isn't it well until we've opened it up now and the next specification of USB so us before will be interchangeable with Thunderbolt 3 as far as I'm aware and that uses a Type C so yes a type-c connector I think Apple I mean Apple has said they're continuing with Thunderbolt you know it is the thing that they've been pushing for since day one you know even today Thunderbolt with PCs isn't really that common it starts become more common with notebooks so apples always been a big pusher a thunderbolt so I think they will continue to do that and they have said they're going to continue to do that but whether that's via USB 4 or not we don't know have to wait and see so you mentioned earlier about Pro users and their machines not being as expensive as they might seem what what's your thinking on that I think there's somebody who doesn't run a business and is an experienced with buying things for business this is probably going to be quite surprising which i think is why what makes it interesting so let's say the Mac Pro so I was actually considering possibly making a purchase of a Mac Pro and a suspect one up I think I chose a 12 core a 5,700 graphics card I think a terabyte SSD left the RAM obviously not gonna pay the Apple tax on the RAM by my own room but that came out in the UK the price for that was seven and a half thousand pounds that's the retail price rich yeah you look at that and you go seven and a half thousand pounds for that computer that is a massive premium you know if you went out to buy a PC with an equivalent specification it's not going to come anywhere near seven and a half thousand pounds even if you buy something with great build quality yeah you know a premium quality product so this is how how you need to work it out and bear in mind you can do this of course the same for pcs so pcs still cheaper because the same logic applies but the Mac Pro is not quite as expensive as it might seem so we take that seven and a half thousand pounds well the first thing is we've got a business that's that registered so in the UK that stands for value-added tax sales tax it's 20% in most cases and we pay it on pretty much everything but for a business that's registered you can claim that money back that's 20% off that ticket price straight away right so it takes you down to six thousand two hundred and fifty so that's the actual price that a business would consider for that computer now we buy quite a lot of Apple equipment directly from Apple so we get a discount a massive discount it's not a massive disc he is a discount like here's a discount usually works at about 7 percent it does vary depending on how much we've bought in the last 12 months otherwise suppose we've got 7 percent off that would take us down to five thousand eight hundred and thirty near you're enough so that's the actual price to purchase that computer obviously you got to have the cash flow because you can only reclaim the v80 every three months from the government depending on where you are in that cycle you know the actual cost to the business is five thousand eight hundred and thirty but bear in mind also we can offset that against our corporation tax yep so depending on how your business is structured it would be a 14 percent isn't it but it's 19 percent if you're a limited company in the UK that's the corporation time and the computer needs to be depreciated over a period of time I won't get into the accounting specifics but let's just assume we're getting 19 percent back so if we deduct that from the price we're down to about 4700 yeah so already a big discount yes it's a huge change from looking at seven-and-a-half grand and if you take that four thousand seven hundred and let's suppose you're going to sell it on again so before Apple did any of the announcements that's when I was looking at it so I'm looking at that thinking I'll keep it maybe for five or six years and then I'll sell it on and we buy and sell a lot of Mac's you know for our web studio so over a long period of time I've been you know doing that for 20 years so I've got a pretty good idea having bought and sold more than 100 different Mac's of how much money we might get back yeah and on a premium product like this I'd expect to get 40% of the original purchase price back yeah I'd say that's reasonable from what I've seen however all bets are off now because they are Apple as an hour on so I'm just let's just say you know a computer like that you're going to upgrade it a little bit over time as we're we put some extra storage in and everything it's going to be worth two thousand pounds to someone I would say it's reasonable particularly if it's an intel-based machine you can still run Windows on it ad infinitum yeah so and you know I mean you still got the the old trashcan Mac Pro's going for more than 2,000 so actually I'd expect we get more than 2,000 but of course there are tax implications and with disposals but let's just call it 2,000 pounds to keep it simple so that effectivity means that the total cost of ownership for the period we own the Mac is 2700 well there abouts and if say we keep it for five years divide that over the mumps and Europe what 45 pounds a month which most people will be surprised at if they don't run the business that but that's that's how we can calculate it when we're assessing a purchase yeah now just to be clear you have to have the cash up front to be able to buy the machine in the first place you can't go out and buy it for 45 pounds a month you need to expend more than that but at the end of it you've got an asset that's still worth something and you can then offset your next purchase with that and because of all those tax differences and everything else that's how businesses calculate the cost of their equipment it's exactly what we do for the studio that's part of my job to respect that stuff up so I do those kind of calculations and we have a fairly good idea of where we're going with those with those things I suppose just one thing you mentioned you can of course do this with a Windows machine as well quite but up until this announcement one of the things we could be pretty sure on is that a Windows machine would not typically fetch anywhere near the same amount as an apple machine yeah that is true very much for the most laptops even premium laptops you don't you I'm sure there'll be people that would argue this with us but my experience is no you don't you don't get as much back for them I mean I had this experience where my HP laptop was destroyed by HP's repair center and I eventually got a brand new one but I'd already bought a Mac by that so I just sold it I didn't even take it out of cellophane wrap put it on eBay and I think I got about 60% of what it was worth if even that and just to be clear it was a new machine it wasn't it was still the current machine when you sold it brand new machine premium quality you know there's HP Spectre x-360 it was a lovely machine it was yeah and in many ways a lot better than the equivalent Mac certainly able to perform a better yeah they're called Core i7 that was in it but that's another story for another day the point is that was a computer that was a best party 2,000 pounds and I got a thousand pounds back for it as a brand new machine now that would not have happened with an Apple computer I might have lost a hundred two hundred something like that so that's certainly history pcs don't fetch as much money I don't think it's quite as true when you get up to pro grade machines Xeon workstations you know HP's Xeon workstations it's still fetch good money but if you do the same songs yes that factors into it that lower resale cost typically made the difference between the cost of a PC and the cost of a Mac not as great as it might appear yeah but I suppose now that you would say all bets are off so that that may affect your purchasing decision any night unless you need software any runs on the Mac yeah and let's be clear here I was about to pull the trigger on that thing and I haven't and can I ask you how do you feel about that taking all the intellectual exercises aside do you feel relieved or do you feel like I wish I'd gone for it I'm still frustrated I'm stuck in indecision still thinking about whether or not I should do it I'm frustrated because I think it's gonna a very long time before there'll be something equivalent that's arm-based but I'm not prepared to invest it's not investing I have to borrow the money you know I haven't tons of cash sitting around to drop on on a huge computers so it's difficult to justify doing that when you don't know what the future holds and that's a big frustration because it means I've got to eke out my 2013 Mac Pro for a lot longer so I'm yeah and I'm still undecided I could still do it but I think it's unlikely so a really interesting exercise there but if someone's sort of hankering for a piece of Apple silicon right now it's actually possible to get one right now isn't it well it may be possible I think they had a finite number and they were giving priority to existing developers yeah but if you're an apple developer which we are we are so we're talking about the developer transition kit which is a Mac Mini yeah it's got an a 12 Z in it just bear in mind a lot of my audience are in this state so they would say a 12 Z apologies to our us or Dave's us viewers but I'm English so I'm gonna say Zed I am very English so an a 12 said which is what's in the latest generation of iPad pros yes a mazing chip 16 Giga RAM no Thunderbolt no but a snip at $500 so I think as we are an Apple Developer assuming they've got some left we should definitely get our hands on a $500 Mac Mini with an ARM chip it yeah there are some caveats to this there always are gone what are they well first of all yeah you can have one of those but you have to sign an NDA so you can't post online any benchmarks or anything like that although people have already done that broken the NDA but but we got we designed that we'd be like we'd honor that as well wouldn't we the main issue though is that you don't get to keep it okay so you've got to you've got to give it back to Apple at some point so you don't get to keep it but at least you get your five hundred dollars back nice it's not like a deposit where is it deposit is it deposit into Tim Cook's pension fund and that's the way you should be is not kicking you $500 so let me get this straight Apple want developers who are supporting their ecosystem to give them $500 for essentially shipping a machine on loan until such times as they want it back yes yeah we're not gonna be doing that no not considering the fact that we you know you've got to pay every year just for the privilege of being an apple developer yeah that's crazy isn't it i I don't understand why they couldn't release a developer kit that runs on an iPad why do you need to have the hardware why couldn't we just download some software no because this now presumably can run the latest version of Mac OS the new Mac OS 11 should be able to run stability well I think you've hit the nail on the head it's clearly to just make up for a deficit in Tim Cook's pension fund Apple are quite harder than I think there are down to their last one and a half trillion dollars now yeah and it you know we as you know Apple developers we want obviously support them through this trying and hard time we definitely do because we haven't taken any hits ourselves recently no co vid or anything like that so you know what exactly so let's yeah let's give our money to Apple I mean we do give a lot of money to Apple we do and I think really that brings us to the conclusion of this conversation so um hopefully you can understand our justifications for the decisions or the conclusions that we've come to I think it's fairly safe to say that there's six years of life in Intel max could be longer than that whether or not you're gonna sit and wait will depend on which category of user you fall into and what kind of machine you're looking at we've looked at history to to kind of influence those those decisions which talks about the the graphics were also stuff to wait and see what happens with that I hopefully found the total cost of ownership information interesting and of course the developer transition kit which was I don't get it I really don't I company the size of Apple surely they can they know who their best developers are I can't imagine they asked Adobe to give them $500 for a developer transition kit they don't have been more than that because they would be more we'll make money that could be true so we'll leave it there and thanks for joining me again Peter always a pleasure always good to have a chat now I'm you've recently started your own YouTube channel I'm gonna give it a shameless plug no yes please so you you're interested in health fitness and health tech and your channel is called not another diet and we'll put a link to that in the description below summer Pete's content is quite good some of it is absolutely atrocious let's check it out under yeah we're doing some interesting shooting actually for pete's channel coming up and we'll have some more information about that in the future I hope you also enjoyed this format that we've got going here we're actually thinking about starting this as a more regular show possibly even doubling it up as a podcast so if that's of interest to you just let us know in the comments always love to hear your comments I'm sure plenty of people have got their own viewpoints on the topic that we've been discussing say if this affects you if you're looking at a new Mac if you've pulled the trigger on a new Mac Pro and I know some of you have how do you feel about this this news that Apple's moving to arm are you comfortable with your purchase decision let us know in the comments look forward to talking with you there thanks very much for watching as always please subscribe to the channel if you enjoyed this content subscriptions make a huge difference to small youtubers help us get the channel going it takes a huge amount of work to bring this level of content it's a huge investment so we really appreciate all of your support thank you so much hopefully we did enough to earn a thumbs up or a thumbs down if that's your thing either way see you next time with some more geekeryApple has announced that it's moving away from Intel CPUs in its max over to its own ARM based CPUs which it calls Apple silicon of course if you're in the market for a new Mac should you wait for these new ARM based machines or is it still safe to buy an Intel based Mac now let's discuss so I'm joined again today by my good friend Pete who is also my business partner welcome Pete pleased to be here Dave excellent now what I want to do is answer this question really quickly okay because I I appreciate everybody's time and someone looks up a YouTube video they don't want to listen to us waffle necessarily we will do some waffling but let's answer the question first and I think in order to do this what we need to do is to break down the computers that Apple makes into categories and this is always very difficult because that's almost an impossible task but what we've done is we've decided there are three categories we're going to go with casual enthusiast and pro yep okay so let's start with the casual user okay now this is somebody who uses a computer for content consumption so they're watching YouTube's they're browsing the web checking their Facebook's bit of email some Microsoft Word or Excel or equivalent you know office tasks this kind of user is going to be fairly cost conscious or not not buying the most expensive equipment they don't need the most expensive equipment they don't need to high performance those kind of things so let's just go through Apple's lineup of computers that a casual user my purchase okay so I think that includes the MacBook Air the MacBook Pro 13 inch the two-port model the 21 inch iMac and the lower spec Mac minis okay couple of questions and on a categorization lineup their MacBook Air you can get that in a quad core i7 variant can you know you can so are you putting that in amongst this casual user base I am still doing that because I think that's a vanity upgrade it's yeah it's a quad core i7 in name but it's not the same as having a core Core i7 in the member Pro 13-inch for starters the MacBook Air just doesn't have the thermal design to cope with a high specification processor so as far as I'm aware it runs at a lower wattage it's lower performance I think it's a little bit misleading I mean it is better than the base model but it's not on macbook pro levels of performance and it throttles very quickly when it gets hot which it does very quickly because the fan is not connected in any way to the CPU inside the mouth okay probably sounds like a Harrier Jump Jet as well when it's when it's doing that and you mentioned the MacBook Pro 13 so just to be clear you're just talking about the two port one here yeah and they're the two port on the four port are very different models if you take them apart they're different internally the four port model has two fans has better speakers and it is a different different machine and the entry-level two port model still has the eighth generation CPUs in there's nothing wrong with an eighth generation CPU but obviously the temperature narration has got much better performance better onboard graphics you know yet and the fact that Apple hasn't updated those entry-level models would indicate that they maybe have plans for a new model in the future interesting very good okay and would you include education purchases in this user base yeah I think we do not that education users are casual users but when we insult anybody but obviously education or purchases are always on a budget so they need to get the maximum amount for for the money they've got available so they are likely to be buying these sort of great machines so I think that's a reasonable lineup how can we answer the question for this user base right so I think if you're in this user base looking at these particular machines if you're gonna wait for arm you've not got a long wait you know Apple we're going to tackle these machines first because their CPUs are already good enough to replace all of these machines you know if you if you benchmark this iPad pro which has to a 12 in it which isn't even the latest and fastest what you'll find is that it outperforms all of these machines and all right I actually interestingly I benchmarked my iPhone 11 which has a 13 in and the single core score is considerably higher than than this as well so Apple has got more CPUs in its lineup that will perform at much higher speeds and could easily replace all of these things so I think those are the things that they will tackle first possibly not the iMac just yet but I would expect to see a macbook pro 13 inch with two ports or possibly more but an entry-level macbook pro 13 inch with an arm CPU before the end of the year I could be completely wrong but that's just my expectation possibly a MacBook Air or a MacBook if you remember the old 12-inch MacBook that would be a good candidate for an arm CPU and the Mac Mini because of course Apple already use that for the developer transition kit yes it'll be later so if you are happy to wait a few months is what we're talking about we mean we're filming this in July we're probably talking about September October time so if you're happy to wait until then you can be pretty sure that there will be some arm computers available that will fit your needs and will handle these workloads and will be better than the Intel machines in all likelihood so we're saying if you if you can wait yeah but you don't have to right I think you know Apple we're going to support the Intel machines if there's at least six years of support for those and again we'll discuss our thinking on that in a moment but there's at least six years support so you'd probably be perfectly safe by an Intel machine and whether you buy Intel or arm it's going to cope with that workload you know content consumption browsing the way of email and office those kind of tasks no problem at all even a bit of like gaming actually with apple arcade type titles fair enough so the next sort of user base that we've identified or category is what we're calling the enthusiasts yeah so I think an enthusiast is someone who's more interested in computing more interested in the specifications of their device so they may have a higher specification whether they need that or not is kind of irrelevant they want to have a have a better machine photo-editing maybe bit of video editing perhaps some music production those kind of things I can see category of user there yeah I'd agree with that and have you got in mind the machines that you sort plop into that category yeah so I think we're talking about the MacBook Pro 13 inch the four port model yep probably the base model of the 16 inch member pro as well really okay I know it's a bit more expensive but well I know that they were enthusiastic I means okay I'd say the iMac 27-inch and the top spec Mac Mini the six core i7 yeah I think that falls into it into yes I know some pros actually buy those as well but I think I put it in your enthusiastic camp fair enough and how would you answer the question for this group of users well it's very similar really you've still got the support lifecycle but a little bit different for the enthusiast now I'd expect that an enthusiast user would be on a shorter upgrade cycle so maybe three years you know maybe even two years or you know a shorter cycle or a casual user might keep their machine for a bit longer oh if even if they're not keeping it for longer they probably don't worry so much about the sale price at the end because it's a lower-cost machine at the outset so someone who's expecting to move a laptop on in three years they'll probably be happier you know they'll have an eye on what the price will be for selling that on ebay at the end and putting it towards their next laptop sure so if Apple are still supporting Intel for six years then getting rid of the Machine at three years would be ideal and they'll still be a used market for it in those casual users that want to buy a used machine with higher specification yeah okay that makes sense to me so I would have no issue buying any of these machines Intel if it's what you need now because if you wait for the arm equivalents of these I think you'll be waiting a little bit longer but I think we will see these necessarily this year possibly next year interesting we'll talk about that a bit more in detail in a sec last face absolutely and the iMac is is one just to consider because I don't think it's any secret that the iMac is gonna get a redesign yeah now when we watch WWDC us there are a lot of those pro displays kicking about and I actually wondered whether we they were going to transpire to be the new iMac I think you might be onto something with that and I think we might see a new I Mac sooner than you anticipate okay but we'll have to wait and see master agency there is certainly talk of a 24 inch iMac so that the smaller one will get get a bigger screen and we'll see what happens to the bigger one but those of those are really great computers those 5k displays it's a great value proposition if you don't already have your own monitor what you get for your money is it's really good it's a really good machine yeah so I think yeah so for the enthusiast if you need something so you know by Intel be confident in that if you happy to wait you know you're going to have a bit of a weight on your hands but then there'll be an arm alternative okay so that then brings us to the pro group of users that we've identified them and what sort of machines would you pitch in that category when we consider a pro user we're talking about a very wide variety of possibilities you know you could be a a wedding photographer that's a pro user up to a research scientist or a developer you know a video editor and that could be someone who's editing videos you know on a small scale it could be you know an actual Hollywood movie studio so that there's just massive variety and let's not forget audio professionals who need something like the new Mac Pro for example for the PCIe upgrade ability yeah so a huge variety of users what machines are they using I think we can include the MacBook Pro 16 inch some of those users so we're seeing saying some some of those might be in that casual sorry that enthusiast category but because of that that is an awesome machine we're saying that pro users particularly with the high specs might use that yeah I think so if you're a professional photographer for example you do location shooting you probably are going to want a notebook the MacBook Pro 16 inch has got plenty of them fin it and great when you take it back to the studio as well so I can definitely pro users will be interested in that okay ting that machine the iMac 27-inch I'm including that again but we're talking about the top model or with the i-9 in it oh nine yeah okay Vega 56 and you know when you spec it up like that it offers in a lot of cases more performance than the iMac pro for two-thirds of the cost yes crazy really brilliant of course we're including the iMac Pro but when it comes to the base model of I'm a pro I don't think I'd buy that if I don't think I would buy the iMac pray but that's just unless you really want that gunmetal finish which some people will in fact enthusiasts will buy the on that Pro because they want that I think that's do Civet II and you got the money and I always say this if you've got the money and it's what you want go for it you know it's not our place to judge what people should and shouldn't do with their money so we're just trying to define you know reason of all categories everyone can figure out where they where they fit in these things but with the iMac Pro if you're looking at getting that for performance you know the base model is outperformed by the iMac 27-inch in a lot of cases so you can spend less money and get the same performance if you need the Xeon processors you need the ECC Ram you need to you know the 12 core or if they do it 12 Corvette you need them more cause you need that performance then why would you buy an iMac Pro I think now that the Mac Pro is available you'd buy the Mac Pro yeah and by your own display to go with it so I think the iMac Pro it's probably a bit of a bit of a white elephant in line up at the moment I think so okay I think I'd be cautious about purchasing that when it comes to the Mac Pro obviously people look at this and they I mean I've said the same thing this is a really expensive computer you're paying a lot of a massive premium for the specification that you're getting yeah and a lot of people would say you can get an equivalent these spec to Windows machine for a lot less yeah and that's perfectly true you can but some people need Mac they need Mac OS they need the software that runs on Mac and they're tied to it and changing is not an option so they need to go with the Mac Pro and actually we'll talk about this in a little bit but it's not as expensive as it appears okay so if you're a professional you're buying for business yep because we say a professional gets paid for their work therefore it's a business purchase you know a lot of cases businesses will be you know will have tax incentives for the things that they purchase they can offset it against the tax they pay which actually brings down the cost of everything again as and a business we'll look at something and say you know how long do I need this this tool for how long do you know what kind of lifecycle do I want out of this computer how much is it going to cost me over that period of time am I happy with that cost so when it comes to answering this question it's a case of if you need it you've got to buy it yes you can't as a business you can't wait around and I think you will be waiting around a long time for Apple to release its own silicon versions of these computers okay and I'm not even convinced that the Mac Pro will get upgraded within the next two years I mean Apple spoke about a two-year transition period but I think that's unlikely is Apple gonna be able to make its own processors that perform on the level of say a 28 core Xeon and to have the graphics performance of the four Vega two graphics cards that you can spec on me which is just crazy crazy so I I think that one will be a little while coming so if you if you're waiting for arm you'll be waiting for a long time so I think for a business you've got to buy Intel so those are the quick answers to the questions so I want you to get the answer done done quickly and then we can talk about why we've come to these conclusions so we're going to talk about what's happened you know in history we're going to talk about graphics cards just great graphics cards what's the future for those EGP you going to do some interesting calculations for total cost of ownership to show you how the Mac Pro is not as expensive as you think it is can we also talk about the software developer kit that Apple is providing for um developers to develop for arm yes yes we can excellent let's let's do that so first of all I think it would be useful to just reflect back on a little bit of history now this is not the first CPU architecture transition that Apple has done so if we look back in history and recall the transition from PowerPC over to Intel CPUs we maybe learn some lessons and look at the time scales of what happened then and apply those time scales to this transition we maybe come up with some ideas on how long Apple is going to be supporting each yep I think that's a good idea so if we go right back so PowerPC to Intel and I do remember this because I was a Mac user at that time you know I had various different PowerPC Macs and also through that transition period I had both PowerPC and Intel Macs you know using Rosetta and so I've got a fairly good grasp of what it was like back then I think it'll be similar again this time how would you sum up the process in a couple of words literally actually it was pretty seamless but there were things that didn't work you know there were things that he had to solve for instance your PowerPC Macs you know software was available for both PowerPC and Intel yet to pick the right thing and what happened his developers started to prioritize the Intel development over you know what you've done what you would expect to happen happened and you know we had the Intel max and for a while they were running applications through Rosetta which was a little bit slow but it was okay you know it was a period that we got through and I think Apple did get some hatred as a result of it but at the same time it was the right thing to do because a PowerPC CPUs were just not keeping up with Intel and Apple was making this great pretense of saying how great things were I remember all the efforts for the g5 power Mac you know and everybody knew that the Intel machines massively outperformed this thing and apples trying to sell this as a state-of-the-art computer and it just clearly wasn't so I think it was the right thing to do I think this moved to arm is the right thing to do one of the things that makes apples so appealing is that they control the hardware and the software and with control over the CPU that gets even better the optimization gets much better that's not to say that Windows isn't a great system if I think I think it's worth saying that it's amazing what Microsoft has achieved when you consider the millions of possible permutations of Hardware combinations yeah and you know Windows 10 is fantastic it's very stable but they don't have that ability to do that kind of Hardware optimization in the same way that Apple do so I I think he's a good move and I think it's worth going through the pain area four I also think I'll miss the future and I've been saying that you know for a long time so was it 2005 that the announcement was made to move away from PowerPC to Intel chips by Apple yeah WWDC June 2005 and I think the first Hardware didn't ship until the following January 2006 yeah and then we got a 15-inch MacBook Pro okay and then in February there was a Mac Mini remember that was quite cheesed off because I just bought the g4 Mac Mini that's previously and then in May we had the MacBook July was the iMac and then in August we got a Mac Pro using the same cheesegrater chassis that they'd use for the Power Mac g5 yeah I remember so a huge amount of computers released in the space of a year was six months really wasn't it mm-hmm yeah but of course the advantage was that all of the Intel processors were faster than their PowerPC equivalents so most of these were called 2 duos and we had them obviously the Mac Pro was a Xeon based yep so they did the hardware change fairly quickly I don't think it'd be as quick this time unless Apple's been preparing this for years you know maybe maybe we'll all get surprised by it but I suspect the hardware changeover will take take the two years I was talking about and what's your thinking behind that why not the six-month a period that we saw back with PowerPC to Intel well we don't know him it could be we just don't know how good Apple's silicon is doing I mean we know what we've got in the iPad we know how amazing it is so yeah you benchmark this thing and you get a faster single core performance and a fast a multi-core performance than my MacBook Pro 13 inch which has got the i7 855 nine you processor that is not a slouch that is a decent processor and it runs well in that in the MacBook Pro 13 inch I never use that computer thing going this is really slow it's not it's great but this is faster and not only that when it comes to graphics performance so the Intel chip has got the iris plus 6 5 5 this is 50% quicker it's incredible yeah now with no cooling as well we're no cooling and of course what everyone will say is a habit you can't take those benchmarks seriously because they this is a bursting thing you know it can burst up to that speed but then it's gonna get thermally throttled back I'm not convinced about that because I actually use my iPad for editing photos I've even done video editing on it and I've never sat there thinking this is slow I've never sat there thinking this is getting really hot the only time it gets really hot is when you've run games on so I'm not convinced I think it is as good as the benchmarks indicate further to this I actually had to use this as my main computer if you remember earlier this year it's several weeks I was doing all my work on an iPad and it was and you were cheerful which is an indication that it performed well it's a rare thing so yeah it is a very good good system so the CPUs are already brilliant but we don't know how much more brilliant yeah yeah what's what's the latest gestation yeah what's the a14 gonna be like you know nobody really knows so it's not affecting your viewpoint on potentially the rollout of new hardware yes okay because I as good as City as good as it gets there's the graphics issue that we still need to talk about and there's the simple fact that the Mac Pro can be bought with a 28 cause Eon and no matter which way you look at it the arm CPUs that Apple currently have are not there yet will they get there you know by the end of the year probably not I think you know it's going to take a little bit longer to see all of these things get refreshed I'm not even convinced that we'll see an arm Mac Pro within the two-year period okay I'm prepared to be wrong on that but we'll wait and see well let's maybe look back on this in six months time and see if we were right so that I mean that was the hardware let's move over to the software and the support for the Intel system yep so the first Intel only Mac OS was ten point six which was snow leopard Snow Leopard and that was 2009 yep so three three years after the the hardware transition yes and four years after the announcement they'd gone to an Intel only operating system so if we apply that same logic to this transition period then we would expect that in 2024 there will be an arm only version of Mac OS yeah now that doesn't mean that overnight all of the Intel machines are going to stop working you know Apple will still provide updates security updates for their systems beyond when did Apple drop support for PowerPC so support for rosetta which essentially would would be that was dropped from Mac OS in ten point seven which is Lion and that was July 2011 and interestingly the last Apple app to feature support for PowerPC processors was iTunes ten point six point three and that was released in June 2012 so a consumer app was understandably the last thing to be supported so the last PowerPC and Intel release of Mac OS was leopard so that would have been ten point five yep and that was obsolete in June 2011 yeah ceased to receive the security updates and stuff so basically six years that's where we were getting our six years from that we were quite in earlier if Apple does the same thing again then in 2026 they'll have dropped security updates for intel-based Macs yeah basically so if you're someone who then owns an Intel based Mac you're you're then in a position where can you run it for awhile without getting security updates and the answer today is yes you can I mean the computer won't stop working so typically people developing Mac OS apps are going to be using Xcode so at the moment that's one development suite will now output two different applications two binaries basically you'll have one for x86 and one for armed but presumably once Apple stopped support Xcode won't have that facility anymore so how will app developers continue to update their apps well they won't they won't be able to know in all right good I mean there are other ways of developing apps so there may be some niche applications that do still get updated but in the main after six years it is really defined and this is going to affect that resale value on the use market that we spoke about earlier that's not to say that people won't want to buy these machines you know lots of there is a market for retro computers and curiosities but the market will be flooded with these machines yeah so I'm expecting the resale values will be very low people will buy them though it's still to run Windows on them yep because they of course will run Windows and hopefully Apple will provide a facility to make that easy on the intel macs you know but I wouldn't count on it so if you're taking that six years into consideration most people you know with a laptop you know the casual user that we spoke about earlier it might stretch their laptop out you know some people keep their computers for a very long time I've got a MacBook Air from all my wife has gone MacBook Air from 2012 that she still uses that's eight years old and it runs fine so I mean it just this is something that needs to be considered by everybody who's thinking about buying an Intel machine that's I mean we've already answered a question and you don't need to not buy an Intel machine but how much further in time do we need to get before you're going to start something hmm it's probably not a good idea now you know in six months from now would we still be saying it's okay to buy an Intel machine again I think if you're a pro user the arguments you've put forward say probably that's still okay if you're an enthusiast you're probably on the cusp of thinking no if you're one of these casual users so I would say definitely not okay so history shows us then that we we've probably got you know six years that's where we're getting our estimation from but Apple have said they want to do the transition in two years so they've also said they're going to keep supporting Intel max for a long time they also said that they still got new Intel max in the pipeline so it could be different it could actually be longer than six years if Apple is still releasing new into a max yeah and I guess there's also that kudos factor because I suspect Apple make a visual delineation between perhaps ARM based machines and Intel based machines and that in itself may make people want to have the arm-based ones as an almost a kudos thing hmm yeah I can see that happening I think something else that we need to say as well so yeah I think six years is probably a worst-case scenario it could be that Apple wall will support them for longer as something to bear in mind is that when you're an early adopter of new Apple stuff you do do some beta testing for them it's definitely true and that's true across Apple's entire lineup so I think a lot of people probably want to hang on I can't see professional users wanting to jump into arm CPUs I think no they'll hold back and wait and see what's actually gonna happen okay so that's that's the history bit done what's next okay so you mentioned earlier about discrete graphics and will that be a thing with the new arm-based processors okay so in Apple's developer documentation they talk about the new Apple silicon as being a system-on-chip SOC so the graphics is built into you you know it's one chip that does everything so you haven't got that cost of copying stuff over PCI Express and that's where Apple gains efficiency because of the way they do things so you know the the GPU has its own tile memories which you can use for doing various things and then when it gets to final render it will then use the system memory in a more traditional approach with a discrete GPU on PCI Express that you know there's a lot of tuna throwing so Apple can do more with less they don't need to make GPUs as powerful as a discrete GPU to get the same amount of performance as something else to factor in as well as that Apple is already using arm CPUs to accelerate graphics yeah so the t1 chip is a t2 t2 so this is the security chip if you've got a touch bar or fingerprint reader Mac I think it's in the new Mac Pro so the security chip is an ARM based processor and it gets used for encoding and decoding various types of video and that does speed things up and that's a great example of efficiency isn't it rather than having a chip that basically just does one job and sits dormant the rest of the it's actually being utilized by the system at other times which is a good example of how Apple's complete control that the closed loop does bring benefits yeah solutely because the t2 chip is also handling the interaction between the hard disk and a CPU as well so Apple is able to do more with less specification and that's why although on the surface of it you can say oh I can go and get a better PC for less money actually if you put a PC and a Mac side-by-side with the same specifications sometimes you'll find that the Mac is is faster it's not always the case obviously PCs completely win out when it comes to gaming but there are things where where the Apple is just more efficient because Apple has that massive advantage over Microsoft and the PC market so discrete GPUs don't seem to be part of Apple's develop a roadmap as it stands at the moment but it's difficult to see how they can do that because we mentioned earlier you can spec that Mac Pro up with effectivity for are very few queries and graphics cards yet I think are they 16 or 32 gig of ram each you know I mean it's a huge amount of GPU resource now apples so the GPU in here if you do a metal testing Geekbench 5 I think it comes in just under 10,000 and the the newer chips probably bench a little bit ahead of that but you're still a long way short of one of those Vega to use you know which i think is more like 18 90,000 or the 5700 that you can spec you know that's going to be in the 70,000 oh yeah so how does Apple replace that kind of massive GPU performance on the mac pro with a simple system on chip don't have the answer and that may tie into you know you've been talking about whether they just gradually retire the mac pro and bring out something else but even then that question is still there to be answered yeah and I don't think they can abandon PCI Express because if you take an audio professional you know they need hardware they need adding cards to connect up their various bits of equipment they need those PCIe slots yeah so I can't see how Apple can abandon that but and there are other armed machines out there with PCI Express there are and you know so there's no no reason why we couldn't have discrete GPU still it's just that Apple hasn't included that in its current road map what it's announced to the developers they're focusing on the discrete GPUs but then that also makes sense because those are the machines are going to focus on first I was gonna say it fits into what we're predicting here in terms of the the casual user base giving their upgrades personally they won't need discrete graphics anyway so obviously you've been doing a lot of focus in your videos on EGP you where do you think that sits with apples plans and their silicon for a while Apple were really pushing EGP you and it is a great solution when you get it working but I found that there are lots of issues with it Apple has stopped selling the Blackmagic Design II GPUs that Excel the sonnet breakaway puck either which they used to sell have they got anything that they saw no no okay so the other the other issue is um some people are reporting that in the latest Mac OS in Catalina the Polaris GPU so that's things like the rx 580 if you've got an e GPU based on that and there's issues in Catalina it seems right and there's definitely issues in Catalina with the 5,700 XE some weird bug in the drivers just cripples the performance unless you plug in a second monitor yeah and then you get the performance it's really bizarre and the fact that this bug still exists and there's been two Mac OS updates since the reports of that book came out since those drivers were implemented so apples not made it a priority to fix those things so I get the feeling they're abandoning a GPU which i think is a poor thing to do considering how much money people have invested in it I was going to say if you've been made that investment you're gonna feel pretty aggrieved aren't you with that lack of support and those bugs well yeah because you know they used it to sell a lot of Mac minis let's be honest and a lot of laptops where you might have otherwise bought a desktop machine deliberate or just a change of direction I just I think is they went with what they thought was right at a time much like the 2013 Mac Pro you know they thought dual GPU computing was going to be a thing and it never never turned out that way mainly because Apple didn't make it easy and that that's another thing developers need to have easy access to this stuff with the 2013 Mac Pro for example you got two AMD graphics cards in there but to take advantage of it the developers need to code the app in a certain way if you stick Windows on the same machine what you'll find is that the two MD cards are connected via crossfire X yeah and because Windows the way Windows treats that it just means more apps can take advantage of it so you actually get better performance in windows of your GPUs on your Mac Pro 2013 Mac Pro days that's just a typical example of Apple designing themselves into a corner and they're not being prepared to to fix the issue yeah and you know they do I feel in some cases they do treat their customers with contempt in the way that they just abandon people who spent a lot of money on their recommendation yeah Apple was pushing EGP you heavily and I guess the problem with that is if they keep doing that which they do it can make you sometimes skeptical about what to invest in although obviously the move to arm is a it's a fairly cemented and sure bet hmm so what about um Thunderbolt support because that's an Intel technology isn't it well until we've opened it up now and the next specification of USB so us before will be interchangeable with Thunderbolt 3 as far as I'm aware and that uses a Type C so yes a type-c connector I think Apple I mean Apple has said they're continuing with Thunderbolt you know it is the thing that they've been pushing for since day one you know even today Thunderbolt with PCs isn't really that common it starts become more common with notebooks so apples always been a big pusher a thunderbolt so I think they will continue to do that and they have said they're going to continue to do that but whether that's via USB 4 or not we don't know have to wait and see so you mentioned earlier about Pro users and their machines not being as expensive as they might seem what what's your thinking on that I think there's somebody who doesn't run a business and is an experienced with buying things for business this is probably going to be quite surprising which i think is why what makes it interesting so let's say the Mac Pro so I was actually considering possibly making a purchase of a Mac Pro and a suspect one up I think I chose a 12 core a 5,700 graphics card I think a terabyte SSD left the RAM obviously not gonna pay the Apple tax on the RAM by my own room but that came out in the UK the price for that was seven and a half thousand pounds that's the retail price rich yeah you look at that and you go seven and a half thousand pounds for that computer that is a massive premium you know if you went out to buy a PC with an equivalent specification it's not going to come anywhere near seven and a half thousand pounds even if you buy something with great build quality yeah you know a premium quality product so this is how how you need to work it out and bear in mind you can do this of course the same for pcs so pcs still cheaper because the same logic applies but the Mac Pro is not quite as expensive as it might seem so we take that seven and a half thousand pounds well the first thing is we've got a business that's that registered so in the UK that stands for value-added tax sales tax it's 20% in most cases and we pay it on pretty much everything but for a business that's registered you can claim that money back that's 20% off that ticket price straight away right so it takes you down to six thousand two hundred and fifty so that's the actual price that a business would consider for that computer now we buy quite a lot of Apple equipment directly from Apple so we get a discount a massive discount it's not a massive disc he is a discount like here's a discount usually works at about 7 percent it does vary depending on how much we've bought in the last 12 months otherwise suppose we've got 7 percent off that would take us down to five thousand eight hundred and thirty near you're enough so that's the actual price to purchase that computer obviously you got to have the cash flow because you can only reclaim the v80 every three months from the government depending on where you are in that cycle you know the actual cost to the business is five thousand eight hundred and thirty but bear in mind also we can offset that against our corporation tax yep so depending on how your business is structured it would be a 14 percent isn't it but it's 19 percent if you're a limited company in the UK that's the corporation time and the computer needs to be depreciated over a period of time I won't get into the accounting specifics but let's just assume we're getting 19 percent back so if we deduct that from the price we're down to about 4700 yeah so already a big discount yes it's a huge change from looking at seven-and-a-half grand and if you take that four thousand seven hundred and let's suppose you're going to sell it on again so before Apple did any of the announcements that's when I was looking at it so I'm looking at that thinking I'll keep it maybe for five or six years and then I'll sell it on and we buy and sell a lot of Mac's you know for our web studio so over a long period of time I've been you know doing that for 20 years so I've got a pretty good idea having bought and sold more than 100 different Mac's of how much money we might get back yeah and on a premium product like this I'd expect to get 40% of the original purchase price back yeah I'd say that's reasonable from what I've seen however all bets are off now because they are Apple as an hour on so I'm just let's just say you know a computer like that you're going to upgrade it a little bit over time as we're we put some extra storage in and everything it's going to be worth two thousand pounds to someone I would say it's reasonable particularly if it's an intel-based machine you can still run Windows on it ad infinitum yeah so and you know I mean you still got the the old trashcan Mac Pro's going for more than 2,000 so actually I'd expect we get more than 2,000 but of course there are tax implications and with disposals but let's just call it 2,000 pounds to keep it simple so that effectivity means that the total cost of ownership for the period we own the Mac is 2700 well there abouts and if say we keep it for five years divide that over the mumps and Europe what 45 pounds a month which most people will be surprised at if they don't run the business that but that's that's how we can calculate it when we're assessing a purchase yeah now just to be clear you have to have the cash up front to be able to buy the machine in the first place you can't go out and buy it for 45 pounds a month you need to expend more than that but at the end of it you've got an asset that's still worth something and you can then offset your next purchase with that and because of all those tax differences and everything else that's how businesses calculate the cost of their equipment it's exactly what we do for the studio that's part of my job to respect that stuff up so I do those kind of calculations and we have a fairly good idea of where we're going with those with those things I suppose just one thing you mentioned you can of course do this with a Windows machine as well quite but up until this announcement one of the things we could be pretty sure on is that a Windows machine would not typically fetch anywhere near the same amount as an apple machine yeah that is true very much for the most laptops even premium laptops you don't you I'm sure there'll be people that would argue this with us but my experience is no you don't you don't get as much back for them I mean I had this experience where my HP laptop was destroyed by HP's repair center and I eventually got a brand new one but I'd already bought a Mac by that so I just sold it I didn't even take it out of cellophane wrap put it on eBay and I think I got about 60% of what it was worth if even that and just to be clear it was a new machine it wasn't it was still the current machine when you sold it brand new machine premium quality you know there's HP Spectre x-360 it was a lovely machine it was yeah and in many ways a lot better than the equivalent Mac certainly able to perform a better yeah they're called Core i7 that was in it but that's another story for another day the point is that was a computer that was a best party 2,000 pounds and I got a thousand pounds back for it as a brand new machine now that would not have happened with an Apple computer I might have lost a hundred two hundred something like that so that's certainly history pcs don't fetch as much money I don't think it's quite as true when you get up to pro grade machines Xeon workstations you know HP's Xeon workstations it's still fetch good money but if you do the same songs yes that factors into it that lower resale cost typically made the difference between the cost of a PC and the cost of a Mac not as great as it might appear yeah but I suppose now that you would say all bets are off so that that may affect your purchasing decision any night unless you need software any runs on the Mac yeah and let's be clear here I was about to pull the trigger on that thing and I haven't and can I ask you how do you feel about that taking all the intellectual exercises aside do you feel relieved or do you feel like I wish I'd gone for it I'm still frustrated I'm stuck in indecision still thinking about whether or not I should do it I'm frustrated because I think it's gonna a very long time before there'll be something equivalent that's arm-based but I'm not prepared to invest it's not investing I have to borrow the money you know I haven't tons of cash sitting around to drop on on a huge computers so it's difficult to justify doing that when you don't know what the future holds and that's a big frustration because it means I've got to eke out my 2013 Mac Pro for a lot longer so I'm yeah and I'm still undecided I could still do it but I think it's unlikely so a really interesting exercise there but if someone's sort of hankering for a piece of Apple silicon right now it's actually possible to get one right now isn't it well it may be possible I think they had a finite number and they were giving priority to existing developers yeah but if you're an apple developer which we are we are so we're talking about the developer transition kit which is a Mac Mini yeah it's got an a 12 Z in it just bear in mind a lot of my audience are in this state so they would say a 12 Z apologies to our us or Dave's us viewers but I'm English so I'm gonna say Zed I am very English so an a 12 said which is what's in the latest generation of iPad pros yes a mazing chip 16 Giga RAM no Thunderbolt no but a snip at $500 so I think as we are an Apple Developer assuming they've got some left we should definitely get our hands on a $500 Mac Mini with an ARM chip it yeah there are some caveats to this there always are gone what are they well first of all yeah you can have one of those but you have to sign an NDA so you can't post online any benchmarks or anything like that although people have already done that broken the NDA but but we got we designed that we'd be like we'd honor that as well wouldn't we the main issue though is that you don't get to keep it okay so you've got to you've got to give it back to Apple at some point so you don't get to keep it but at least you get your five hundred dollars back nice it's not like a deposit where is it deposit is it deposit into Tim Cook's pension fund and that's the way you should be is not kicking you $500 so let me get this straight Apple want developers who are supporting their ecosystem to give them $500 for essentially shipping a machine on loan until such times as they want it back yes yeah we're not gonna be doing that no not considering the fact that we you know you've got to pay every year just for the privilege of being an apple developer yeah that's crazy isn't it i I don't understand why they couldn't release a developer kit that runs on an iPad why do you need to have the hardware why couldn't we just download some software no because this now presumably can run the latest version of Mac OS the new Mac OS 11 should be able to run stability well I think you've hit the nail on the head it's clearly to just make up for a deficit in Tim Cook's pension fund Apple are quite harder than I think there are down to their last one and a half trillion dollars now yeah and it you know we as you know Apple developers we want obviously support them through this trying and hard time we definitely do because we haven't taken any hits ourselves recently no co vid or anything like that so you know what exactly so let's yeah let's give our money to Apple I mean we do give a lot of money to Apple we do and I think really that brings us to the conclusion of this conversation so um hopefully you can understand our justifications for the decisions or the conclusions that we've come to I think it's fairly safe to say that there's six years of life in Intel max could be longer than that whether or not you're gonna sit and wait will depend on which category of user you fall into and what kind of machine you're looking at we've looked at history to to kind of influence those those decisions which talks about the the graphics were also stuff to wait and see what happens with that I hopefully found the total cost of ownership information interesting and of course the developer transition kit which was I don't get it I really don't I company the size of Apple surely they can they know who their best developers are I can't imagine they asked Adobe to give them $500 for a developer transition kit they don't have been more than that because they would be more we'll make money that could be true so we'll leave it there and thanks for joining me again Peter always a pleasure always good to have a chat now I'm you've recently started your own YouTube channel I'm gonna give it a shameless plug no yes please so you you're interested in health fitness and health tech and your channel is called not another diet and we'll put a link to that in the description below summer Pete's content is quite good some of it is absolutely atrocious let's check it out under yeah we're doing some interesting shooting actually for pete's channel coming up and we'll have some more information about that in the future I hope you also enjoyed this format that we've got going here we're actually thinking about starting this as a more regular show possibly even doubling it up as a podcast so if that's of interest to you just let us know in the comments always love to hear your comments I'm sure plenty of people have got their own viewpoints on the topic that we've been discussing say if this affects you if you're looking at a new Mac if you've pulled the trigger on a new Mac Pro and I know some of you have how do you feel about this this news that Apple's moving to arm are you comfortable with your purchase decision let us know in the comments look forward to talking with you there thanks very much for watching as always please subscribe to the channel if you enjoyed this content subscriptions make a huge difference to small youtubers help us get the channel going it takes a huge amount of work to bring this level of content it's a huge investment so we really appreciate all of your support thank you so much hopefully we did enough to earn a thumbs up or a thumbs down if that's your thing either way see you next time with some more geekery\n"